Bio

Hello ✌️

I’m Head of Data at Carbonfact, where we measure the carbon footprint of clothing items 🍃. Before that I worked for Alan, a health insurance company. My PhD topic was about applying machine learning – Bayesian networks in particular 🕸️ – to query optimisation in relational databases 🤖. My current areas of interest revolve around online machine learning 🍥, document processing 🔬, as well as tooling and good practices for data analytics 📊 and engineering 📦

I’m half British 🇬🇧 and half Belgian 🇧🇪. I went to university in Toulouse, France 🇫🇷. My academic 🎓 background is a mix of math 🧮, economics 💸, and computer science 🖥️. I got hooked into data science in 2014 after watching Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill nerding it out in Moneyball ⚾

I enjoy programming and maintaining open-source projects. In particular, I co-created River 🌊, an online machine learning library written in Python 🐍. I’m a Kaggle competitions Master 🏆 and take an interest in competitive data science. I also get a kick out of writing blog posts and occasionally giving talks 🤓

Besides work, I like to spend time reading 📚, watching movies 🍿, cycle touring 🚲, juggling 🤹, playing frisbee 🥏, looking at – and sometimes making – modern art, and cooking 🍲 – my signature dish is lasagna 🇮🇹. My favorite snack is a peanut butter 🥜 and banana 🍌 sandwich and my go-to beer is Guinness ☘️. I have a brother who’s into theoretical physics and low-level software engineering 😵‍💫. My girlfriend Sarah and I are the happy parents of little Olivia 🐤

Feel free to send me an email at maxhalford25@gmail.com if you want to get in touch 🤝